Thursday, August 16, 2007

Slave Driver Peter Angelos

The United Workers was founded by homeless day laborers in an abandoned firehouse turned into a homeess shelter. The group started through a series of discussions about the root causes of poverty. Workers asked questions and challenged even our own assumptions about the causes of poverty. Homelessness is often demoralizing, especially when blame is misdirected at the victims of poverty and not at those who benefit from poverty.

[...]

Slavery was a word that came up a lot. Wages barely enough to feed yourself, let alone to support a family on, are slave-wages. Working to survive is slavery. We recognized that the system itself, like the slavery system, was broken. It was broken and was breaking us.

Humm...I'm noticing a trend here. Well, I'm sure they have good cause to compare their working situation to that of slavery. Enter the Baltimore Sun:

Luis Larin once fasted six days to protest rising electricity rates in his native Guatemala.

Now a day laborer in Baltimore, Larin is among 11 current and former temporary workers who will begin a hunger strike Sept. 3 to secure higher wages for those who pick up the trash at Oriole Park at Camden Yards.

[...]

The hunger strike announced yesterday is the latest move by the United Workers Association to pressure the Maryland Stadium Authority to meet its demand for better pay.

Camden Yard workers typically earn $7 an hour. They're asking for at least Baltimore's living wage of $9.62, even though the city's minimum wage doesn't apply to the workers since the stadium is state owned.

Ahhh!!!! The horrors of slaving away, picking up trash for $7/hr....The outrage!! Well, if that isn't tantamount to slavery then I don't know what is. Slavery. It's like slavery. Get it? Slavery.